Mail Merge = FAIL

Here's a little gem from my Wall of Shame.

I've never claimed to be technologically literate. Computers and I just don't speak the same language. It baffles me that some process worked 99 times before suddenly won't work anymore.

The same is true with mail merge.

(Tangent)
Microsoft did something kind of nifty where you can take a Word document and write an e-mail in it, then use mail merge to pull e-mail addresses and names from an Excel spreadsheet and send the whole shibang to your contacts through Outlook. Genius, right?
(End Tangent)

It should be fool proof ... but it's not.

So, I was doing this mail merge thingy for the first time, and I was a little nervous because it was going out to a bunch of important editors. I walked myself through the steps and tried to make sure everything was in order, and then hit "send." E-mails started flying through my outbox, and it was really cool until I started noticing that none of them had the editor's name at the beginning of the e-mail. I started panicking, wondering what I had done wrong and why some egghead hadn't invented time travel yet.

Here's kind of what the e-mail looked like:

Hi [Editor],

Blah, blah, blah ... blah, blah, blah.

Yadda, yadda, yadda ... yadda, yadda, yadda.

Thanks,
Nathan

While the room was still spinning, I started getting responses back, and it looked like no one had noticed the glaring mistake.

I thought I'd dodged a bullet ... then, I got this winner (thankfully, he had a sense of humor):

Your e-mail merge didn't quite take, did it?

Best,
[Editor]